Small changes to a website can mean the difference between a customer clicking again or closing the page. In turn, these customer decisions can have a huge impact on revenue and other business outcomes. By creating a platform that enables clients to make website improvements based on concrete data insights, AB Tasty has grown since 2009 to become a global company with seven offices worldwide, processing over 17 billion visitors over that time.

"The big challenge in our sector at the moment is personalization: tailoring a website to a visitor's interests, in order to enhance conversion rates and customer satisfaction. To make the modifications as targeted and pertinent as possible, an enormous volume of data is required to develop sophisticated, automated algorithms."

—Rémi Aubert, Co-founder, AB Tasty

The key to AB Tasty's success has been delivering an all-in-one approach whereby clients can understand their customer's journey through integrated user insight tools, test different website variations, engage their audience and personalize the on-site experience, and of course, analyze the results. All this is achieved on one platform that also adheres to relevant regulatory compliance guidelines.

"The advantage of AB Tasty is that our clients can try out different options, then make decisions based on actual gains," says Rémi Aubert, Co-founder at AB Tasty. "The big challenge in our sector at the moment is personalization: tailoring a website to a visitor's interests, in order to enhance conversion rates and customer satisfaction. To make the modifications as targeted and pertinent as possible, an enormous volume of data is required to develop sophisticated, automated algorithms."

Previously, AB Tasty's data architecture was hosted in the cloud with another provider, but its system was not able to deliver the performance necessary for processing the two billion events that AB Tasty handles every day. "An event is a message that corresponds to an action carried out by a visitor on a website, such as a click," explains Jean-Yves Simon, VP Product of AB Tasty. The company found that building its data architecture on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) proved to be the answer.

"Now, at every stage, we can manage and update the pipeline without interrupting the service. Cloud Dataflow does its job perfectly: it handles everything automatically so we can be sure of every cluster and really stand by the quality of our data."

—Jean-Yves Simon, VP Product, AB Tasty

Building a pipeline for 25 million users a day

To stay ahead, conversion optimization companies need to provide their clients with access to quality data in as close to real time as possible. AB Tasty's previous system was not able to process the large number of transactional events generated every day. "With our previous system, we reached a limit of one billion events a day and couldn't move above that, whatever we tried," says Jean-Yves, "So we looked for a solution that would enable us to scale up the storage volume and processing power while reducing the response time for queries. We teamed up with Google Cloud Partner SFEIR to guide us through the first steps of the project."

To do that, AB Tasty built its data pipeline on GCP. "We migrated the data in two phases: first the data collection part, together with SFEIR, then the data analysis part. It took only a week for a minimum viable product (MVP), and 10 months in total, and we managed to do it with zero downtime," says Jean-Yves. "Now we store raw data in Cloud Storage, aggregated by user session. We use Cloud Dataflow for both batch processing with Cloud SQL and streaming with Cloud Pub/Sub. The data feeds into BigQuery, where we can query across every user session of every client. That's 25 million user sessions a day.

"Throughout the data pipeline, we want to be able to review and prove the quality of our data," says Jean-Yves. "Now, at every stage, we can manage and update the pipeline without interrupting the service. Cloud Dataflow does its job perfectly: it handles everything automatically so we can be sure of every cluster and really stand by the quality of our data."

"With our new data pipeline and warehouse, we are able to personalize access to large volumes of data that were not previously there. That means new insights and correlations and, therefore, better decisions and increased revenue for our customers."

—Jean-Yves Simon, VP Product, AB Tasty

Speeding up response times

Improving response times was one of AB Tasty's most important challenges for the migration. "We set ourselves the goal of 50 milliseconds as an event response time, as our previous response time was two or three times that," says Jean-Yves. "Now, the average response time for each event is around 30 milliseconds. That's perfect; we surpassed our objective and are able to offer an improved service to our customers in terms of processing data in close to real-time."

Reaching out to new markets

Since migrating to GCP, AB Tasty is able to handle 2 billion events every day. "With our new data pipeline and warehouse, we are able to personalize access to large volumes of data that were not previously there," says Jean-Yves. "That means new insights and correlations and, therefore, better decisions and increased revenue for our customers." As well as improving its optimization algorithms, the company's new data architecture means its clients can query data directly via BigQuery. "We are able to add extra value within the data that we offer our clients: we can either construct reports for them by default or leave them to explore their own data themselves," Jean-Yves explains.

Now, AB Tasty is planning to expand its markets in America and Southeast Asia, and is exploring how its platform could be enhanced with Machine Learning: "We want to use AI to develop new algorithms that will simplify the task for our clients even further, and take all the guessing out of the process," says Jean-Yves. "We're also planning to expand our data volumes by up to ten times in the coming months. Thanks to GCP, expansion isn't a problem."

About AB Tasty

AB Tasty is an all-in-one website optimization platform that enables its clients to make data-driven decisions that help improve conversion rates.

Industries:Technology

Location: France

About SFEIR

Shaped by and for talented developers, SFEIR helps its customers take on the most ambitious technical challenges and create state-of-the-art applications.